Neural Dynamics and Computation Lab

About us

The last century witnessed the unfolding of a great intellectual adventure, as
the collective human mind turned outwards to conceptually reorganize our understanding of space,
time, matter and energy, now codified in the theoretical frameworks of quantum
mechanics, general relativity, and statistical mechanics. Similarly, in neuroscience,
we are in the midst of another grand quest, as we turn inwards to conceptually
understand the workings of the very same mind capable of achieving the feats of
the last hundred years.

We are a diverse group of physicists, mathematicians, computer scientists, bioengineers
and neurobiologists, dedicated to this quest. We are motivated by two overarching
questions:

How do fundamental higher level cognitive phenomena like perception, memory, attention,
decision making and motor control emerge from the collective interactions of many
dynamical degrees of freedom embedded within networks of neurons and synapses?

Can principles of high dimensional statistics and computation provide a unified
view of how we as neuroscientists can extract biologically meaningful models of
neural systems from large datasets, as well as how neural systems themselves can
extract predictive models of their environment from the stream of sensorimotor
experience?

To pursue these questions, we exploit and extend tools and ideas from a diverse
array of disciplines, including statistical mechanics, dynamical systems theory,
machine learning, information theory, control theory, and high-dimensional statistics,
as well as collaborate with experimental neuroscience laboratories collecting physiological
data from a range of model organisms, from flies to humans.